


Gold Dust

by Ocelotting



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: AU, M/M, Time Travel, second world war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-10-19 12:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17601407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ocelotting/pseuds/Ocelotting
Summary: In which Sirius is both a Stevie Nicks fan and part-mermaid.





	Gold Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Chromat1cs for inspiring and beta’ing this.

Gold dust 

August 1982. Wales and Westminster

Remus’ hand ached, and his mind couldn’t form sentences any more. Enough for now. Time to sleep and not, please Merlin, to dream. Tomorrow he would start again, drag out another dozen pages on werewolf history and if the book turned out a lumpen mess it would at least be true. It would be the book he’d looked for as a child in the Hogwarts library and had never found because it had never been written. 

The next day the sheets of A4 were where he’d left them, but not as he’d left them. Their crisp edges were ragged, their whiteness yellow and cracked, the ink he’d written the night before faded. It looked, it felt, Remus thought as he held onto the edges of his sanity with both hands, it was old. 

He put the faded pages away in the top left drawer of the desk, locked it, and started writing on fresh paper. The next morning the same thing happened again. And again. And again.

It began to feel like company. 

‘As you’re reading this’ he wrote ‘help me out. I could do with an editor’.

The next day the new/old pages were scribbled over in faded red ink. Printer’s marks, no words, as if the ghost was trying to hide his handwriting. 

‘I’ve a ghost editor’, Remus told Peter over lunch. 

Lunch was in the Ministry canteen, and all around them were Ministry staff in awe of the great Pettigrew, the youngest ever Minister for Magic, the hero of the war against Voldemort. 

‘Write your next book about ghosts’ Pettigrew said. Remus laughed and put his head in his hands. It felt good to be with his old friend again, and he was happy to answer Peter’s questions.

August 1942. Bloomsbury.

Laurie Odell had only been acting nightwatchman for three weeks and would go back to Oxford at the end of the long vac, but you get used to roles fast in wartime.

His job, now, was to make sure that the objects evacuated from the British Museum had a safe home deep underground, in what had been and would be again Aldwych tube. 

That morning, when he heard a knock on the door he expected yet another delivery of something beautiful and shut up in a box to save it from bombs. 

He stood up, leaning on his stick, and walked carefully to the door, unlocking the three heavy locks, pulling back the bolts, and hoping the Museum’s porters had remembered to bring him lunch.

Then he opened the door and there, miraculously there and not not not at the bottom of the deep blue sea was a navy captain, his navy captain, smiling at him with a fine, unconscious arrogance. 

‘Come here then’, said Ralph Lanyon, his fair hair as neatly combed and his uniform as crisp as if he’d come from the parade ground not convoy duty on the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Come here and say hello to me’.

‘Careful’ Laurie had had to say ‘There’s a ghost watching.’

August 1982 Westminster and Wales

Remus spent a productive week in the Guildhall archive, drinking tea, taking notes and at night sleeping in one of Peter’s many spare rooms. 

On the train back to Wales, looking over his notes, he was full of good intentions for the book, and for his life. He’d tidy his house, he’d talk to at least one person a day, he’d leave the house every day, he’d buy new clothes. He’d finally throw out everything that was left of Sirius and start afresh. 

Remus was so caught up with his thoughts that when he got home it took him a while to notice. 

If he hadn’t hung around with James and Sirius during the war, Merlin if he hadn’t tagged along with them on Auror missions, he might never have noticed. 

Everything was almost as he’d left it: books all over the floor, blankets piled up on the sofa, takeaway leaflets the only thing in the fridge. 

Almost, not quite. The books were just a little tidier, the blankets a little more folded.

Absurd though it was, there was only one explanation. His rooms had been searched by the Ministry. 

Peter would have to be told right away - he’d know what to do. Remus sat down at his kitchen table, coat still on, and dashed off a letter. 

Then (and he would through run through the next five minutes a dozen times or more before he accepted the evidence of his senses) he’d put down his quill, gone to the window, whistled for an owl, and turned back to roll up the the letter.

‘Don’t trust him’, was written impossibly under his signature, written in the graceful script that was kicked into all Black children and that they never grew out of no matter how rebellious they were, Andromeda’s handwriting a carbon copy of Orion’s and Walburga’s, Regulus’ of Sirius.

Sirius Black who had betrayed them all, who had led Lily and James to their death, Sirius who had been on Voldemort’s side all along.

Sirius who had died the year before.

August 1942, Bloomsbury

Later, in his rooms over the Museum Tavern, Laurie stroked Ralph’s hair as Ralph curled easily on the old hooked-wool rug.

‘You didn’t laugh’ Laurie said, ‘when I told you about the ghost.’

‘I’m a sailor’, Ralph answered. ‘I’ve had to learn to believe in things that shouldn’t be there, but are.’ 

‘Mermaids’ Laurie said, laughing. 

‘Don’t laugh’, Ralph said. ‘Mermaids saved us from a U-boat once. They can be bitches, but they’re tough.’

As if it were unnatural to him to meet an emergency except on his feet, Ralph got up briskly and walked over to the fireplace, making Laurie feel both impossibly fond and like the first mate on a ship about to leave port.

What do we know about your visitor?’ Ralph asked.

‘He’s a ghost’ Laurie said. 

‘We don’t know he’s a ghost’, Ralph said. All we can know is what you’ve seen.’ 

Before Laurie could say that it might not be a ghost but it wasn’t a mermaid either, Ralph had fished out a naval memo pad from goodness knows where and was writing in his neat, sloped writing.

Laurie listed what he could remember seeing and hearing.

Boxes - heavy ones - floating in the air.  
Flashes of light.  
Food and drink disappearing.  
A man’s voice, singing strange songs

Ralph broke off writing. ‘Anything later than Mozart’s strange to you. Tell me about the music’. ‘I can try’, Laurie answered, and sang:

‘Did she make you cry/make you break down/shatter your illusions of love.’

He stopped, unsure how to read the look on Ralph’s face, then went on ‘There was more, about silver spoons, digging graves, lousy loves. Nonsense, strange nonsense’.

‘Not nazis, not Vera Lynn’, said Ralph, ‘and too far inland to be a mermaid’. 

August 1982 Wales

Remus looked at the letter and its impossible postscript and decided not to trust himself, not to trust the instinct that made him want to write back. 

‘Never trust anything if you can’t see where it keeps its mind’, he said aloud, then folded the letter up, wrote a new one explaining what had just happened and sent the lot to Peter by express Owl post. 

Everyone said that Peter had made the owls run on time for the first time since Merlin.

‘Chapter Two’ Remus thought. ‘Werewolf hunts. Come on Remus, set to it.’ He settled down into a rhythm, the flow of work keeping stray thoughts down. 

August 1942. Bloomsbury

Laurie showed Ralph the boarded up sights of his new neighborhood, happy for once to be the guide and not the guided. 

Once down in Aldwych tube Laurie locked the doors against the outside world, then turned and spoke to the air. ‘Whoever, whatever you are. We’re not at war with you.’

Out of the half-light and the dust a shape shimmered and took form until a man with black hair and pale grey eyes was sitting cross-legged on Laurie’s desk.

‘Who are you’ Laurie asked, and then because it seemed a reasonable question under the circumstances, ‘are you a mermaid?’

‘My great-great grandmother was’ said Sirius Black. ‘She drowned men and wrecked ships.’ Then he paused and said helplessly ‘ I need you. I need an anchor in now to pull a man out of the future’. 

Ralph and Laurie glanced at each other, each checking the other’s decision, and then Ralph said briskly ‘We’ll help’.

August 1982 Wales and August 1942 Bloomsbury.

Remus was lost in Hungarian werewolf myths, his tea growing cold by his side, and he never heard the Aurors apparate into his living room. 

Even when he saw himself surrounded he didn’t register the danger until he saw the silver handcuffs and that Shacklebolt couldn’t look him in the eye.

The past year rearranged itself in his mind, like a trick picture that he’d been looking at wrong. He gave up hope and in the same moment he felt an invisible hand take his and drag him out of time. 

The last thing he saw was Shacklebolt’s relieved face. The first thing he saw in the new world was a street lined with boxes instead of houses and then Sirius, alive.

Ralph poured some of his more generous doubles and the four of them became friends that afternoon, running through forty years of history to tragedies and hopes, glorious days and nightmares. 

‘My mother’s German’ Remus had said. ‘They’re not all. It’s not’ and his voice had faltered away.

As the sun was going down outside Sirius told them of how he’d tracked Peter down that Halloween and how Peter had flung him backwards through time.

‘He wanted to send me further back’ Sirius had said. ‘Back to the dinosaurs or earlier, before there was air to breathe. Something drew me here. There’ll be some Black artefact buried in one of these boxes.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Whatever it is, I’m glad it landed me here’.

‘It might not be that’ said Ralph slowly, in the intent rather muddled tones of a man who was defining his thoughts to himself as he went along, ‘there might be a better reason. You could come in useful here you know. We rather need help too’.

Neither Sirius nor Remus listened. They set to work to build themselves a time-bridge back into their near-present, but whatever they did they couldn’t make it work. 

Days passed, then weeks, until Ralph’s leave was almost up. 

‘It’s as if’, Remus had said one morning, ‘as if there was something keeping us here’.

‘Maybe there is’ Ralph had said, with the look of a captain whose crew are finally starting to understand the sea.

‘It must be deep magic’ Remus had said. ‘I’ve run every spell I can think of and there’s nothing. Not the trace of an aura. This is just an ordinary place.’

Ralph looked at him patiently ‘Ordinary except for half the world’s treasures in packing cass, a werewolf-wizard, a mermaid-wizard, and a world war raging outside.’

There was silence for a moment and something drew Sirius and Laurie towards them to listen.

‘Perhaps’, Ralph said,’Perhaps you can’t leave because you’ve work to do here, now.’

‘We can’t’ Sirius started to say, but Lanyon interrupted.

‘You can magic yourselves uniforms and papers. If we lose this war your war will be lost before it starts’.

‘My book’ Remus said, ‘I have to finish my book’. 

‘Finish it now’ Sirius said. ‘Then it’ll be there waiting for you at Hogwarts’.


End file.
